


What The Dormouse Said

by FyrMaiden



Category: Hedwig and the Angry Inch - Trask/Mitchell
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 16:18:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4673252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And when it's all over, we still have to clear up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What The Dormouse Said

The sound of applause rings in his ears as Yitzhak leaves the stage. Hedwig is gone, and he knows that everything is different now, has to be different now. She gave him something that sounded - or felt, perhaps - like an apology, beneath it all and he’s - he’s - confused. Something happened, something broke, and -

And it’s been a long time, a lot of months piled one over the other, smothering and bitter and full of hurt, but it’s a lot of emotion to just let go of. Hedwig had looked at him, in those last minutes, standing before him with the wig in her hands, and he’d felt it, that disconnect, the release. And he knows he could go, could run now, and she’d let him. But it’s not that simple - first he has to know, has to check on her, the way he always has after every one of their dive gigs where she drinks too much to mask how much she hurts. And he knows she hurts, can feel in the way she hurts him, and yet -

He can’t find her. For as long as he’s known her, she has been loud. She has been abrasive and vicious and cruel, even in her silences. That he can’t hear her now is almost worse. He pulls the wig from his head and blinks glitter from his eyes, and he takes a moment to just breathe, to draw the air into his lungs. Filling him up and setting him free…

…Freedom’s just another word, though.

 

For the first time since 1989, Hedwig sees her - his - their body, stares at it reflected back at her, devoid of artifice and rage and full, instead, of hurt and anger, and they see - They see their skin, they see the contours and ridges of soft muscle and hard angles, the cinch of their waist and the breadth of their shoulders and the tangled mess of hair and the ruination, the nothing between their legs, and for the first time since Tommy, they let themselves feel.

In the dark, away from the people and the lights, above the stage, Hedwig lets herself cry, lets Hansel cry, gives herself to the pain and the accumulated violences committed against her, and she feels -

 

Habits are hard to break. Yitzhak stands the wig on the head in the dressing room. The shower in the corner drips, and Hedwig’s furs are discarded messily on the couch, bra dropped on the floor in an uncharacteristically twisted heap. The shift is draped over the back of the make-up chair, and the flat dead eyes of Hedwig’s idols stare down at Yitzhak from the walls as he picks it up and holds it against his body before folding it into a neat square and placing it on the countertop beside Hedwig’s wigs and jars of make up. One night only, and she’d moved her entire rig in… She - they, or she, he doesn’t know, doesn’t know if it matters or if Hedwig knows entirely, the way she’d looked at her own hands and her own arms and ripped her own body apart as if she’d never seen it - Hedwig had sat in the chair when they got to the theatre, sipped beer through a straw and watched the band and Yitzhak labour, swearing at them in vitriolic German when they did it wrong. “Do I have to do everything myself?” she’d raged, slamming the lid of her make up case down and thrusting her feet into impossible heels, pinning Stevie to the wall six inches above Yitzhak’s reach. “Here. I said here.” She’d thrown herself back into the chair and covered her face with her hands, and then, “Get out. All of you. I’m tired of looking at you. You hurt my eyes.”

Those same flat eyes that had judged earlier now seem so much more full of sympathy…

He turns away and finds the shorts under the table, and folds them neatly with the slip, and then unzips the corset of his own dress, removes his boots and leaves the panties on. Panties and hose and he breathes as he presses his lips together, painted vivid pink and he’s missed this - missed feeling pretty…

Finding Hedwig, though, that has to be next.

 

He can tell by her expression that the pain down in her soul is the same as the pain down in his… He hums the melody, and her head snaps up. Only - without the cropped blonde he’s come to know, with her hair wet and curling at her temples, and her face expressionless and full of emotion, it’s not her, not any more. The person standing in front of him is not the woman he’d married to leave Croatia. It’s not the woman he’s given so much to, and got so little back from. Hedwig is nowhere in the body standing exposed and vulnerable in dark above the stage.

“Why are you here?” Her voice is tired, lower, cracking in her throat. Yitzhak holds out a bottle of water, and she reaches out. Her nails still glitter, the blue so thick it’s chipping already. Even her extremities know the facade has fallen. It only took twenty years. She’s the new Berlin Wall.

“Where else do I go?” he asks, and he sees the way her mouth curls up around a laugh that’s cold as ice when it erupts.

“Anywhere,” she says. “Anywhere at all. A thousand miles from here. Somewhere sunny. They’d love you in Florida.” She sips her water and stares at him.

“Go,” she says, and then, “Zu verlassen.” Yitzhak doesn’t move. She cants her head and stares at him, but the stare isn’t as cold as it used to be, as it was this afternoon or this morning or in the early hours of the morning when she fucks him… The lights catch the damp on her face when she finally turns her head away, and he takes a step closer.

“Don’t,” she says, her voice breaking on the word. She sounds different. Her voice trembles and evens on a pitch he’s only heard when she’s tired or angry. She draws her robe closer around her, shivers, and he stops where he is.

“I’ll see you at the hotel,” he tries, and she blinks and frowns and shakes her head.

“No,” she says. She looks at him directly, and he swallows. Everything he wants is on offer, but walking away is - is hard. She has been his American Dream. Everything else is - possible, maybe.

And maybe it shows on his face, because she offers him maybe the first real smile he’s ever seen on her face, and gestures for him to go. “Find your corner of the sky,” she says, and he knows he hasn’t misheard.

 

She’s the last to leave, or almost the last. The band is long gone, and Yitzhak soon after. On top of her make up box is the ring she gave him, and she knows she doesn’t deserve more than that. He deserves a home, happiness, and she can’t provide those things, not for two people. Not for two separate people.

She has to learn to be a home for all of her own moving parts first, has to learn to let her own lives coexist. Has to learn to be whole, not avenues of compartmentalised loathing and pain.

She draws her coat from its hanger and wraps it around herself, takes one final look around and then slips out into the warm, close heat of a city that doesn’t sleep, every bit as anonymous and overlooked with her hair short and dark as she had been in the furs and wigs on the way in.

She takes one breath, then a second, and she walks, head high, into her new life.


End file.
